referenced, and it was a very popular work among the army during World War I. Inspirations of Battle Studies As a primary inspiration to du Picq, fellow Périgueux native Marshal Thomas Bugeaud was responsible for supporting him in his calculating and objective view of military operations. Bugeaud's experiences with Marshal Suchet, a highly regarded former general of Napoleon's, left an indelible impression upon the Marshal that were handed down to du Picq. Marshal Bugeaud's aide de camp, Louis Jules Trochu, provided another inspiration with his work L'Armée Française en 1867, in which Trochu emphasized psychological difficulties in warfare. Military theories His principal interest was in the moral and psychological aspects of battle; as he himself wrote of the battlefields of his day: "The soldier is unknown often to his closest companions. He loses them in the disorienting smoke and confusion of a battle which he is fighting, so to speak, on his own. Cohesion is no longer ensured by mutual observation." Nor did Ardant du Picq neglect the decisive importance of modern firepower, noting that it was necessary for the attacker to "employ fire up till the last possible moment; otherwise, given modern rates of fire, no attack will reach its objective." Despite these words, much of his work was later used to help justify the doctrine of the offensive à outrance, resting somewhat on his statement that "he will win who has the resolution to advance." What separated du Picq's belief from this new idea was that while du Picq accounted for differences in enemy positions and circumstances in the art of maneuver, the offensive à outrance made no such distinction, making the offensive victorious no matter how it is employed. This stark difference from du Picq's theory was put forward principally by Colonel de Grandmaison. Assessment In sum, Ardant du Picq was a talented analyst and, had he lived, would have gained a fine reputation as a military historian. His analyses stressed the vital importance, especially in contemporary warfare, of discipline and unit cohesion. Along with Carl von Clausewitz, he was a major influence in France after the defeat of the French army in the Franco-Prussian War, and their attention to psychological and behavioral factors in combat was judged to be supremely important. The morale aspect of warfare that du Picq encouraged was propagated later by the writings of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, in which he also concluded that